A Writer’s Diary Entries From Early September, 1999
Wednesday, September 1, 1999
2 PM. I’m really stressed out. My foot felt even worse today, but I did an hour’s reading about plantar fasciitis on Lexis, and this looks like a condition which takes time to treat.
I’m going to continue to look for suggestions, but I bought some heel cups at Walgreens as a start. Unfortunately, I can’t take NSAIDs like naproxen, ibuprofen or aspirin without feeling nauseated and agitated – though I do take 81 mg. of enteric-coated aspirin each morning.
Anyway, I don’t want to risk it today. I just iced the foot and I’m trying to stretch out the heel cord. Perhaps I need a night splint or should try out some of the techniques I read about, but first I need to get past this acute episode.
Although it appears that there was no trigger for this episode, perhaps it was spending hours standing when I’m teaching. As hard as it is for me to teach from a seated position, I did that for the most part this morning and will try again tonight.
I went to bed early last night, but when I woke up at around 3:30 AM after six hours’ sleep, I was unable to get back to dreamland. So I iced my foot, tried not to stress out, read the Times when it arrived at 5 AM and listened to NPR.
This morning at Nova, I had a good class – though the students seemed less than rapt listening to the oral arguments in Miller v. California.
They were more engaged with the 2 Live Crew video which featured the part about me and Radio Free Broward although a few of them missed that because they weren’t paying attention.
I gave a brief rundown of the history of obscenity laws and we got up to Miller and its three-part legal standard.
After class, I called Jonathan, who said he’d just been speaking to Dad, telling him that the movers had come to the house early and seemed about halfway done.
I told Jonathan I’d come over with my apartment keys so he and Mom could let themselves in, and then I called Dad and Marc, both of whom once apparently had the same plantar fasciitis problem I do, though theirs stemmed from running. Dad suggested I buy the heel cups, and they are a bit more comfortable.
When I got to the house at 11:45 AM, the movers were just closing up the truck. Mom gave me sets of keys and various stuff for the Cougar and I kissed her goodbye in case I don’t see her later today or tomorrow morning.
The motel said I could check in after 3 PM, so I’m going to go over there just after I take a nap.
The car started steaming or smoking at the light on Pine Island and Nova, but it stopped right away. I half-expect it to break down on the way to or from the motel.
God, if only this were a Thursday and I had no classes, and especially no night class, this would be a lot less stressful.
Between my foot problems and car problems and having to spend the night in a motel after I teach for three hours – on not enough sleep – I don’t know how I well I can manage the rest of the day.
Thursday, September 2, 1999
7 PM. This week has been every bit as stressful as I thought it would be. I am looking forward to teaching my class tomorrow and then spending most of the long weekend lying in bed, resting my feet.
This afternoon I went back to the podiatrist, but instead of Dr. Sheinberg, who seemed sanguine about my condition, I saw his associate Dr. Goetz, and she gave me news that was alarming.
I do have plantar fasciitis, but that’s not the problem causing the terrible pain. Instead, she diagnosed that as “posterior tibial tendinitis at insertion secondary to collapsed arch.”
She took x-rays which showed that at least I don’t have an extra bone that would require immediate surgery or any arthritis yet (though I’m bound to have that problem in the future).
Her immediate concern was that the chronicity of these episodes will cause the tendon to rupture, which will create problems I don’t want to imagine.
She had me try on a Camwalker – a soft cast going up my leg, a more expensive alternative to a hard cast (which is difficult to shower with) – but I decided to wait until I see that I’m not getting any better.
She said the New Balance shoes I had on were no good because they were too soft and allowed me too easily to walk all wrong, which is my natural tendency.
And she told me that I was also stretching incorrectly, concentrating on the heel cord instead of the calf. She advised me never to stretch while I’m having these inflammation attacks, which is exactly what I’ve been doing.
Dr. Goetz said I will have to wear orthotics the rest of my life – and by the way, my left foot is actually in worse shape than the one that’s been bothering me.
I left her office feeling helpless, confused, and yet also grateful that she’d lavished so much attention and time on me.
But writing all this down, I’m starting to wonder if Dr. Goetz isn’t an alarmist who’s trying to sell me a lot of stuff – though she did want me to wait for orthotics until my Nova health insurance kicks in.
Everything she said may be true – but who can trust health care providers these days?
When I was a kid, I felt that my pediatrician, Dr. Stein, was all-wise and had only my best interests at heart. Most adults probably felt the same way about their doctors in the 1950s and 1960s.
Today, like education, science and everything else, medicine has become suffused with the worship of the free market, and it’s just another business. But I don’t want a businesswoman taking care of my health.
It’s sad I even have to wonder. Anyway, if I walk as little as possible, perhaps I can get over this episode by the start of next week. I’d at least like not to be limping.
Last evening the pain was severe. One of my students, a reflexologist, kept manipulating my foot during the break and telling me I’d feel some relief – but I didn’t.
At least I made certain I had a good class. “Great” was how Suellen described it afterward.
I tried to clear up advocacy of lawless action from Schenck to Brandenburg and then covered obscenity with the help of my audiotape, videotape and newspaper clippings.
It was an exhausting, stressful night. I’d checked into the La Quinta Inn at 3 PM and watched a good Gen X slacker movie on HBO – I never caught the title – and then came back to the apartment for dinner.
Just as I was about to leave, I spotted Mom and Jonathan driving up, and it was pandemonium as they tried to get the rabbit and a hysterical dog up here along with all their stuff.
I tried to help but then rushed off (as much as one can rush while hobbling) to school before a massive thunderstorm began. Most of my students arrived to class soaking wet.
I got back to the motel at 9:45 PM, early enough to turn on HBO and catch the last ten minutes of The Sopranos, the entirety of the season finale of the gritty prison drama Oz, and a TV movie on Dorothy Dandridge. If I wasn’t in such pain, I would have enjoyed being in the La Quinta Inn.
Somehow I slept, and this morning I went to the lobby for orange juice, a banana and some hot water for my oatmeal packets. Back in my room, I iced my foot before showering and putting on a t-shirt and shorts.
When I called my apartment from the lobby, Jonathan said they’d had an okay night and were getting ready to leave, so I went to Barnes & Noble and drank iced tea and read the free weeklies for an hour until I was sure they were gone.
Mom left me household cleaning products on the counter, leftover food in the refrigerator, and $50 to help pay for the motel. (I used it to pay the podiatrist.)
I didn’t go to Nova today, but I didn’t have to teach any classes and everyone who saw me yesterday could see I was limping badly.
By the way, I found out I was underpaid in my last check. They mistakenly divided $35,000 by 52 weeks rather than 46 weeks (my last paycheck will be June 23, 2000), so I should be getting $1,522 every two weeks rather than $1,346, and I’ll get an extra amount in my next paycheck.
Tama Janowitz, God bless her, gave The Silicon Valley Diet this wonderful, utterly incoherent blurb: “Compulsively readable obsessive modern tales and lunatic meanderings.”
Maybe I can edit it?
Friday, September 3, 1999
8 PM. I’m in a cast now. No, not in a play. I’ve got the Camwalker (Controlled Ankle Movement walker), the removable cast I got from Dr. Goetz late this morning. “I thought you would be back,” she said.
After reading about the catastrophic consequences of tibialis tendinitis posterior if the tendon ruptures and other horror stories – the only Nexis references besides medical journals was the transcript of a Larry King show with a guest who had this in both feet and was in a wheelchair – and feeling pain with every step I took, I realized it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Patrick told me he’d rather have an alarmist doctor than a sanguine one: it was an “alarmist” podiatrist who led Patrick to discover that he was a diabetic.
Although I still have pain, hopefully it will get better if I wear this medieval torture device for another two weeks or so. I take it off at night, in the shower, and when I drive in traffic. (I’ve driven with it, but I can’t feel the gas pedal or brake and don’t want to mistake one for the other.)
I’m also going to stay in bed as much as possible over the long weekend. While I’m feeling depressed, I need to find meaning in this situation, which, even at its worst, is not life-threatening.
It would be awful if I had to be in a wheelchair, for example, but I’ve seen Liz Young function up close when I was in Wyoming and I know that people in chairs manage to live productive and happy lives.
I feel very much alone, what with all my family out of Florida – well, not quite: Jonathan and Mom managed to get up only to the Lake City Best Western in Lake City – Terence used to work for the Indian couple who own it – after they needed to get a new battery at Sears in the Altamonte Springs Mall this morning.
Last night I slept very well and had a dream in which I visited Grant and Libby in Los Angeles and another dream where I was trading clever one-liners about the various planets with a quick-witted nightclub comic.
Sat Darshan said that someone should make a video of Mom and Jonathan’s trip to Arizona with the dog and rabbit; she said it would be the oddest road movie of all time.
I’ve driven I-75 between Gainesville and Ocala so often, and my trips to Tallahassee and Orlando were so frequent, that I could only be amused to listen to Mom and Jonathan’s amazement at “all the trucks who go so fast.”
Could you get more innocent, unworldly people traveling cross-country? Marc and Dad, at least, are in regular contact with reality.
Anyway, I got annoyed with students for coming in late this morning, but I tried not to let it spoil our discussion of the obscenity cases and didn’t waste the last twenty minutes because I played the oral arguments of Cohen v. California (the “Fuck the Draft” jacket).
Steven emailed to ask if I could attend the PAD law fraternity dinner on Saturday night, September 18, as he’s going to Canada to spend Yom Kippur with his mother. I said I certainly would do it if I was mobile.
Patrick sent a reply to my email before he left with his mother, wife and daughter for Clearwater to visit Chris and his family. (Patrick’s mother and Erin are staying with his ex-wife because Chris doesn’t have enough room.)
I IM’d Jaime, “Hope you have a nice weekend,” but didn’t get a reply, which made me feel bad, so I just made things worse by emailing him again. Now I’ll feel really bad if he doesn’t reply to that – especially since I mentioned my leg being in a cast.
Hey, I’ll take sympathy and pity in lieu of love, and the cast is even better than the limp for that. After lunch today, I went back to Nova to get sympathy from Maria, Santa and Charmaine.
On the email newsletter from UF law school, I saw that Jon Mills, as acting dean, named Ken Nunn as the associate dean who’ll deal with the school’s future and all the members of the community. Good for Jon, and good for Ken.
Home since 4 PM, I called Mom and Jonathan after they left a message where they were, and I called Dad to give him their number.
He’s very upset with the difficulties they’ve been having, and he’s going to have to deal with the movers all by himself. But I guess he’s going to have to manage – just like the rest of us.
FAMU acknowledged my application to the grad program in journalism.
Monday, September 6, 1999
3:30 PM on Labor Day. I just now hobbled into the apartment as a thunderstorm was starting. I left my office at the first sound of thunder and barely managed to avoid getting soaked.
Last night I slept soundly, and my left foot was better today, so I have no complaints.
I went to Publix at 8:30 AM to get some milk, frozen vegetables and a big bag of frozen mango chunks, a new product that I long wanted them to carry.
When I got home, I put a load of laundry in the washing machine, exercised for half an hour, put my stuff in the dryer, took a shower, read the paper, got my clothes out of the dryer, sorted them and put everything away.
Then I took the Cougar (taking my cast off to drive) to Barnes & Noble, where I got iced tea and sympathy from the barista.
After a couple of hours at the bookstore, reading the Times, I came home and had lunch and then went over to Nova. The front of the Parker Building was locked for the holiday, so I had to take the side entrance and stairs to the third floor.
Once in my office, I finished re-formatting the Dictionary of Literary Biography article – it is good – and then read some articles on Lexis and checked email.
Alice sympathized with my foot problems. She has been seeing rheumatologists about her arthritis and feels that she, too, has to keep patching herself up.
She and Peter got back on Friday from five days in Amsterdam, so she stayed home this weekend and wanted to be around to hang out with Andreas while he’s out of the hospital and feeling tolerable.
Last weekend he was teaching her how to drive again so that in case he gets tired on a long car ride, Alice can take over the wheel.
Alice went back to her old block and found it a shock; she seems to think the neighborhood had gone downhill.
True, the block is now about half-white and half-black, but it still looks like a nice neighborhood to me, and I know the homes are worth a lot more than they were in the old days.
I guess because I’ve been all over Brooklyn so frequently in recent years, I don’t notices the changes the way Alice does.
People in Manhattan are the last ones to know what’s going on in the outer boroughs. But I’m one of those who thinks the new immigrants have changed New York greatly for the better.
This afternoon Jaime wrote me to say “Hi, sorry about your foot,” and to ask how my weekend went. So he is still interested in being friends. That’s fine because I’m definitely getting over my infatuation with him.
I wrote to Jaime, Alice, and Justin, who I’m glad to hear is finally collecting unemployment benefits.
I hope Mom and Jonathan are okay. I doubt they got as far as Dallas today because I saw on the Web that it’s over 400 miles from Lafayette, Louisiana, where they called from last evening. (They had to go from I-10 to I-40 to find motels that would take pets.)
I know it’s been a rough trip for them. Jonathan and Mom aren’t able to stop at any rest areas because the dog and rabbit can’t stay in the burning hot van.
This morning I came upon an article by 24-year-old Jedidiah Purdy scolding America for elevating irony and rejecting the earnest pursuit of greatness.
Hey, I agree with a lot of what Purdy is saying, but the kid himself seems unbearably smug and humorless as he intellectualizes everything.
On the other foot, I too wish there could be another attempt at a “Great Society” and am sick of what our great 1990s economic boom has wrought.
But I still think Seinfeld is funny. I’m glad I’m not quite as insufferable as I was when I was younger. Getting a little beaten up on the road to middle age has its advantages.
Thursday, September 9, 1999
6 PM. When I went out to get the mail yesterday afternoon, Jonathan left a message that he and Mom were in Van Horn, Texas. I called Dad in Apache Junction and gave him the phone number of their motel room.
Dad said that the movers had been in the house from 8 AM to 11 AM and all their furniture and belongings were now there.
I told Dad that while Ben had mentioned something about my teaching at Nova next summer, I was still planning to leave Florida in May, though I said I wasn’t certain where I’d end up.
“So you’ll come here,” Dad said, sounding like his own father – something he does more and more, and then added, “Not Apache Junction, but Phoenix.”
Well, it’s a possibility, I suppose, especially since Sat Darshan and her family are there.
Two hours ago, Jonathan phoned again, this time from the Best Western in Willcox, Arizona; they’d made it through El Paso during rush hour and past Las Cruces and the corner of New Mexico to the first town in Arizona.
“Already the people here seem more cosmopolitan,” Jonathan said. “In Texas and Louisiana, you were dealing with rednecks.”
They’re about 80 miles from Tucson now, and Jonathan said the climate had gone from semi-arid to true desert. They also went through two time zone changes in a 300-mile drive today.
I told Jonathan that after I went shopping this morning, I stopped by the old house to see if I could find the cats, and to my surprise, they were in their usual places: Mommy sitting by the garage and Baby on her perch in front of the house.
Perhaps the new owners are feeding them because they didn’t look hungry, and if they were starving, they’d be off foraging for food.
I was also surprised that I cared about the cats. Don’t tell anyone what a softie I am.
Jonathan said the rabbit seems livelier now; he lets her run around in the motel room bathroom and cleans up her shit.
Well, let’s hope they get to Apache Junction safely.
I told Mom not to drive Dad crazy when she gets there. Marc had phoned from work yesterday just to get their motel room number so he could call Mom and tell her that she was going to make Dad ill if she kept harping on what he’d done wrong in putting the furniture where he did.
Last evening I got to school at 5 PM. My class went fine although the students and I became exhausted after three hours and I never got beyond New York Times v. Sullivan.
In addition to reading ahead in the text and writing a midterm this weekend, I’m going to make up a revised syllabus for the last four weeks of the course, drastically omitting cases so I can fit in all the topics I want to cover.
When I returned home at 9:40 PM, I felt both exhilarated and enervated, the way I used to when I’d return home to Gainesville after teaching those Wednesday night classes in Ocala.
I slept okay to start, but then I had a dream about my parents in which Dad vomited – and the smell so overwhelmed me that it seemed palpable.
Afraid to go back to sleep, I put on a pop music station and read for a while. Finally I drifted off, dreaming about being with Sat Darshan at the main library in Phoenix and then about having sex with a guy who looked like me, only younger, bigger and hairier.
After a trek to Albertsons for groceries, I exercised and relaxed a bit before my 10 AM appointment with the dentist for x-rays. Once again I had to wait over an hour, and I didn’t get out of there till noon.
I’m convinced that Dr. Bellomio is a crackpot, but he seems to know what he’s doing. He found five cavities and said that I had probably needed the root canal for twenty years.
He also said that my gums are so bad that I probably need to see a physician – “a good one” – because they’re indicative of a systemic infection.
Anyway, I need to see the hygienist first, but it turned out that she didn’t have an appointment available for about a month. That was fine with me, as I’ve been spending a fortune on the dentist and the podiatrist.
I was amused when Dr. Bellomio looked at an x-ray of one tooth and said, “Some NYU guy did that. That’s how they taught them to do it, instead of the right way.” Of course, Dr. Hersh was an NYU grad.
After lunch, I spent the afternoon at Nova. There wasn’t much email, but I wrote back to Kevin.
Sat Darshan wrote that she had a relaxing Saturday since Nirankar took the baby, along with Tyler, to visit her stepfather in Glendale.
Sat Darshan said that Gurudaya just goes to her classes and comes home because she hasn’t really made any friends at college yet; she also seems to be having a hard time with her coursework.
At the Liberal Arts office, I got the syllabi for the courses I’ll be teaching this winter. I think I found books for Private Law and American Thought. Les taught it as a Contracts-related class, using West’s Business Law as his main text.
I’m going to make Torts the subject of my section, and in addition to The Buffalo Creek Disaster and A Civil Action, I’ve found three recent books – one on tobacco litigation, another on breast implant lawsuits, and a general book on torts – that got good reviews in the New York Times.
I intend to do a lot of learning along with my students. Every course of the eight in my schedule for this year is one I’m teaching for the first time – and only Political and Civil Rights has more than one section. It’s like a cram course in teaching Legal Studies.
A student who wanted to start a debate team came into my office and asked if I would coach it. I told him to first try Ed Stieve or another professor who knew something about debate, but if no one qualified agreed to be their coach, I certainly would take the job.
In the last hour, I’ve taken off my cast, and though both feet ache a little, I’ve been walking pretty well without it. Hopefully I won’t have to wear it much longer.